Episode 347 – Kevin Huizenga

“I have a split in my writing life. Part of my brain plans everything out, but I know enough now not to listen to that too much, and that I should be more open to improvising.”

Cartoonist Kevin Huizenga joins the show to talk about his new graphic novel, Glenn Ganges in The River at Night (Drawn & Quarterly)! We get into late-night reveries and using a character’s sleepless night as a base camp for a 200-page book, the ways repetition leads to time travel, making an artistic breakthrough partway through his new work, his modular approach to storytelling and how it jibes with his midwestern comics style, and the risk of identifying too much with his stand-in, Glenn Ganges. We also talk about video-game sobriety, whether his favorite creators are spending too much time on Twitter, learning about indy comics before the internet, and our shared cyberpunk upbringing. And we do the math on how many books in our libraries we’ll actually get around to reading! Give it a listen! And go buy The River at Night!

“One of the great rewards of working on something large over time is not planning it out ahead of time but letting it unfold organically and then looking back and seeing the paths that you didn’t plan.”

“Introspection and self-knowledge is a mixed bag. It’s often bad news when you think about it too much.”

Kevin Huizenga (HIGH zing guh) grew up in a suburb of Chicago, South Holland, which is a small town of Dutch immigrants. He is the son of an accountant and a nurse. In high school he started reading minicomics and quit playing baseball. He attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he started drawing the influential mini-comic Supermonster.

On the advice of a fellow cartoonist, Huizenga then moved to St. Louis where he continued to draw comics, which quickly caught the attention of the industry, and led to his comic book series Or Else. Eventually, he created his series Ganges. Huizenga lives in Minneapolis where he taught in the Comic Art program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 2015-2019.

His graphic novels include Curses, The Wild Kingdom, and Gloriana (all published by Drawn & Quarterly). His work has been translated into six languages, including Dutch; he won five Ignatz awards and been nominated for Harvey and Eisner awards. His new book is The River at Night.